Regenerative Medicine: Healing Chronic Pain and Addressing COVID-19

My feeling on this is interesting is that everything that works for pre-COVID and everything that works for treating acute COVID works for the long haulers. Exactly right.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R, M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And today's conversation matters and it should matter to a lot of people because it's about how to deal with problems that no one else can fix in your health. Dilemmas, we call them. Dilemmas.

And my guest today is none other.

Than Dr. Matt Cook, who's an extraordinary human and physician, who's my doctor, and I'm very picky, who's helped me with many of my chronic issues with my back, which we're going to talk about.

In a little bit.

Matt's an extraordinary doctor. He went to University of Washington Medical School, UCF Residency. He's trained in anesthesiology, he's board certified, he's also trained in functional medicine. but he's kind of a one-oF-A-Kind dude whose practice is an integration of many different modalities and approaches that's designed to regenerate and create human health through science that is emerging that is not really applied really that many places. Matt has really synthesized an enormous amount of information from all sorts of disciplines, Eastern, Western, traditional medicine, functional medicine, regenerative medicine, and has put together an approach that I think is one of the most groundbreaking approaches to health that I've ever seen, including what I do in functional medicine. So I'm sort of in awe of this guy, and I'm so happy to have him on the podcast today.

So welcome, Matt.

Hey, I'm so delighted to be here. Okay, so you're a traditionally trained doctor. You went to medical school, you trained anesthesia, you worked a lot with pain stuff. But what got you into this field of regenerative functional medicine? And we're going to, we're going to Define regenerative in a minute, but what, what led you to change from your traditional training into what you're doing now?

Yes, that's like the question of my life. And everybody, I think everybody, the whole world that's in traditional medicine is kind of thinking about trying to do it and they're asking how you can do it. And I remember when I was in medical school, somebody said, you,'re gonna work your way into a box somewhere. And a lot of times you'll end up pigeonholing that box and you gotta find the truth at some point in your career. And if you can, you want to follow that truth and just figure out what it is because the truth of medicine is going to change over time. And so then basically from the beginning of my practice, I was searching for that truth. And relatively early on, I started to get insights like insights into traditional Chinese medicine, insights into yoga and Ayurveda. Like we had a very similar sort of journey and circuitous path through those things. And then the whole time I was doing like ultrasound guided nerve blocks while I was working as an anesthesiologist. And then kind of the lights went off in my head six or seven years ago when I started to realize, oh, you can start to put them together. And I got kind of famous for doing injections, but I had been doing functional medicine the whole time. And I was kind of wondering which one was going to pop and which one I would end up being kind of known as doing. And then I kind of came to this realization, which we were talking about on sort of in the clinic earlier, that a lot of people that have straight up ascaloskeletal things have an immune or a more complex- Systemic issue. Systemic issue and vice versa. And so then I started really putting that together. And so it's, I kind of feel like we get a little bit better every day.

That's so true.

That's so true.

So, what is regenerative medicine? I mean, we talk about functional medicine, which is a systems approach to addressing chronic illness that looks at the body as an integrated dynamic system and that health is really about creating balance in these systems. It's not really about treating disease per se. And, you have now kind of combined that with an approach that's called regenerative medicine, which I see as really more or less the same thing, but more dealing with some of our structural biomechanical issues and pain. Talk about what is regenerative medicine?

That's a good one. I've never thought of defining it like that, but I would define it exactly how you said. It's a systems approach to musculoskeletal medicine. Then we're looking either from outside all the way in or from inside all the way out. We're looking from the level of the bone marrow to the joint. to the joint capsule, the meniscus, the fascia that affects how kinetic force moves through the body, nerves, ligaments and tendons, and sort of looking to see, are there any problems at any of those levels? Is there a systemic problem? And then trying to figure out strategically what our targets are in terms of where problems are, and then having a thoughtful approach to addressing any one of those problems. with a product that has a potential to hopefully heal those tissues, whether that be a tendon or a nerve or a joint.

Yeah, so I want to talk about some of these products because in traditional medicine we use drugs, right? We even inject drugs. We inject anesthetics or nerve blocks, we inject steroids. But there are all sorts of healing factors in the body. The body has its own healing system, which is why if you cut your skin, it'll heal. But we don't tend to think of how do we activate those systems in our training? We never learned that in medical school. And a lot of what you do is using various substances that are natural substances, things that are found in the body, but in concentrated ways to help restore function and to help regenerate tissue, to help rebuild and restore you're not just removing a part or cutting something out or removing a disc, you're actually helping the body's own innate system activate. And it's so brilliant and it's so common sense and it has no side effects. It has the potential to really bring people back from real challenges. And I just want to take a minute to tell my story and then I want you to sort of talk about what you found and what you did from your perspective and explain how you approach these problems because I had back surgery when I was 32 from a ruptured disc. It created a chronic problem for me. I had weakness in my leg and ended up doing pretty well rehabbed for many, many, many years. And then over the last 10 years, it's starting to degenerate my back and I can feel it aching a little bit and causing different issues. And I've tried a lot of different therapies. I tried injections with steroids. I've tried radiofrequency ablation where they cut the nerves. I've tried even stem cell injections. I've tried acupuncture, massage. I mean, everything helps a little for a little while, but nothing really took it away.

And.

I came to see you about eight months ago before COVID and I was sort of at the end of my rope and I was willing to try anything and I felt like to see you and you did a whole series of extraordinary treatments that had never been done, things I hadn't really heard about that used various things like growth factors and used various kinds of placental tissues and used various kinds of things that the body has to actually help regenerate and heal. So talk about how you approach these chronic problems that are pain issues, back issues, neck issues, joint issues that are really plaguing so many Americans, but they're suffering from them. And we see these narcotic addictions and we see these pain clinics that do help people, but somehow they don't really get into the root of the problem. So talk about, for example, with me, what did you find? What did you do? How did you see it differently? It was like going to a magician and it was like a magic trick. And I remember laying there, getting on in pain and getting off completely out of pain and there were no drugs and there was no anesthetics. I don't even know how that could happen, right?

That was kind of crazy. So force is moving through the body. And so force moves through the body as a wave, but then energy moves through the body. And force moves through the body in the same kind of channels like where meridians and stuff like that are. But when it moves through the body, I like to think of part of the force moving through the bones and then part of that moving through the ligaments and the tendons and the fascia. So it's kind of my analogy is kind of like the Golden Gate Bridge. Part of the force is going through those pylons down, right down into the ocean, but part of the force is going through those suspension cables. So we're part suspension and we're part bone to bone to bone. So then what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to do a look and I'm doing both a physical exam and a movement exam and a neurological exam, but then most importantly, and then an x-ray exam with with MRI and stuff like that. But then most importantly, I use ultrasound and I look at all of those structures.

You're literally looking with an ultrasound machine at my muscles and tendons and ligaments and nerves and bones and it's incredible.

Trying to diagnose what's going on. So, this is kind of a crazy thing, but in the back, we have the spine is made up of a disc and the vertebrae. in the front and then two little facet joints in the back. So force is moving through there. And think of half of the force moving through the front of the spine and then half the force moving through the back of the spine. It's real common for people to get arthritis in the facet joints, which I have terribly. Which you had. And so then my people, I can talk about this, The anesthesia pain people of the world, our philosophical approach has always been to go, -oh, somebody's got pain. If they've got pain in that facet joint, let's see if we couldn't stick a needle in and numb that joint up and make it not hurt. So it turns out, sure enough, there's a nerve called the medial branch. And if you stick in a nerve and a needle and numb that up, Next thing you know, the pain goes away. So then let's say you do that and you go, God, this poor guy's facet joint is causing pain. Then the anesthesia world, what we say is let's try to turn the inflammation off in that joint. And so then they probably went in and put some steroids in there. But then the other thing they will do if that starts to fail is they'll say, let's just kill that nerve. If they kill that nerve, like when.

I had radio frequency ablation.

That's the radio frequency ablation, so they stick a needle in.

Exactly.

And then they turn the temperature way up hot and get it super hot and the nerve kind of dies. Turns out it doesn't totally die, but it kind of dies for a year. So then all of a sudden the pain goes away, but now for the next year you're walking around and that nerve that is controlling how force goes through the back part is not working because it's off. And so then that can't do its job and it leads there to be a little anterior sliding that pinches the nerves coming out. But then the other thing that happens is there's no electrical supply, which means there's no electrical supply to the deep spinal muscles that we call the paraspinal muscles that are kind of like the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge that need to hold everything together. And so what people get, the way that you know if they did a good job on radiofrequency ablation is that you end up getting something called fat atrophy of your spine muscles.

That's what I got.

That's what you got.

That's what I got. They did a good job, but they made my muscles weak. What did you use in my back?

So then I used, I did a couple of things. One thing I did was I did an epidural. with a growth factor epidural kind of that is...

So basically human compounds that are designed to repair and heal that are anti-inflammatory that helps repair tissues.

Yeah, this was an anti-placental compound. It was like an exosome product. But they tend to be very anti-inflammatory. But the primary thing that I use for you is something called placental matrix. And so basically it's a lot of growth factors that come from the placenta and it's placental tissue, but it's got a lot collagen and it's extremely anti-inflammatory. And so I treated your facet joints, I treated your muscles, I treated the fascia where all of the nerves are in the deep kind of spine. And I treated the transverse process of the where basically the ilio-lumbar ligaments are that help stabilize your whole spine. That's a lot of Greek for people.

But essentially it's all the ligaments and.

Muscles that are holding everything together. All the ligaments and muscles that stabilize everything.

Yeah.

And then once that happens- Or is it Latin?

Maybe it was Latin.

Maybe it's Latin. But basically, imagine now those ligaments, those cables on the Golden Gate Bridge of your back kind of regained structural integrity and then force was able to flow through there.

So it basically provides all these reparative factors, placental compounds, growth factors, and even ozone that are designed to repair and stimulate healing. and it was amazing to me that I was really for the first time in almost a decade was mostly pain free for a long, long time. And I've recently come back because I had a disc problem and had back surgery and had a complication that you're helping me with, but it's really the same thing. I just noticed so much improvement so quickly from things that usually traditional medicine doesn't do really great with. And we were talking a little bit earlier and you treat people who come from all over the world with challenging problems. You know, I used to joke because I worked at a health resort called Canyon Ranch that I was a resort doctor. I'm the doctor of last resort in functional medicine. And someone says, you're a dilemma doctor. You have a dilemma clinic. You take care of all the people with dilemmas. And I think that's, that's what we do. We take care of all the problems that no one else can figure out or fix after everybody's tried everything else. And it's unfortunate that medicines like that. But hopefully the things that we're doing will start to disseminate and spread. And I know you're teaching a lot and training people. and we train people through the Institute for Functional Medicine and we're really have, you know, incredible effort to make this more mainstream like we're doing at Cleveland Clinic. But what also is really important people understand is that if you have a musculoskeletal problem or any problem, you can't just treat that problem. We were talking about earlier, if you have a joint problem, you've got to treat the whole system. And I don't know if you remember in surgery when we did surgical rotations, we had some pretty snarky surgeons and they had pretty nasty term they would refer to certain patients as when they were doing operations when the tissue was so bad because you would sew the tissue and the needle, the thread would basically kind of pull through, it wouldn't hold and we called it PPP, right? Remember what that is? Piss poor protoplasm. Oh yeah, piss poor protoplasm.

That was the term everybody used.

And it was a term like, why do you have piss poor protoplasm, which means you're like, your tissues are just crappy. So it's not like you're just like, look like maybe unhealthy on the outside, but on the inside you're unhealthy and your tissues are inflamed, their structural materials aren't good, your nutritional levels are low. So, you're basically the materials of which you are made from are suboptimal. If you're eating crap, you're going to be made from crap. You are what you eat. And if you're eating junk food, your body's going to be kind of junky. So, what we talked about earlier was this idea that's so central to what you do is You don't just treat the back or the joint. You get people healthy overall through diet, lifestyle, other interventions, supplements using functional medicine.

I have never told you this, but I'm kind of emotional thinking about it because you're one of my inspirations. Because no, this is hilarious. I was an anesthesiologist like I was a kid that nobody knew. And so I was going to functional medicine meetings. I was going to IFM meetings. And so that's how I know Patrick and all these people. So, I saw you there and then I was dreaming of being you, but then what happened is I would go back to the surgery center and then I would get people who were those difficult type of cases. And because I was the medical director, what would happen is I'd have them come back and I'd sit from 4 to 7 o'clock at night going through these cases. And that's kind of how I first started doing it. And I started realizing because the surgeons are not really thinking like internal medicine and so that's when it sort of like hit me, it's like, oh, like this is a really big problem and a lot of people need this. And if you can start to apply systems based thinking, then people are going to do way better. And it's just kind of trying to talk people into slowing down a little bit and taking a broader assessment. And then a lot of times, if you start to fix that, and that's how what I learned with For example, think about a knee. Some people, they just have a joint problem or some people they may just have bone on bone and it may be nothing else. But a lot of people that have knee pain have a component of nerve pain. And when I started doing a lot of orthopedic medicine, a lot of sports medicine, I started realizing, oh, there's some people that it's much more complex. It's not just this. and, you know, I loved what you said, because this is my favorite thing. A lot of times you start to do functional medicine, and then all of a sudden that inflammation goes away.

Yeah.

And so then all of a sudden, sometimes the knee pain goes away before I get a chance to treat it.

Of course.

Right.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's so key to understand for people is that, you know, if you have arthritis or you have other joint issues, it may be a systemic problem. It may not just be a biomechanical issue. so for me, I think, you know, I've got a lot of biomechanical issues, but there probably maybe is some underlying systemic inflammation. I don't know. I mean, I've had Lyme disease, Babesia, but I do have a pretty, you know, like crumbly structure in my back because of the back surgery. But I think for a lot of people, if you haven't addressed your diet, if you haven't addressed sleep, if you haven't addressed your gut health, if you haven't made sure your nutritional levels are optimized, your hormones are balanced, your detoxification system's working, if you haven't optimized your mitochondria, which is, what we do in functional medicine, then it's much harder to get better. And it's much faster to heal if you optimize these different things, whatever the problem you're suffering from. So in your clinic, which is incredible clinic, BioReset Medical, I mean, I'm just in awe of what you've done there. You have incredible team of people. You take care of people with all sorts of complex problems. Your staff is amazing. And you really have created a model where you're doing both. so you're doing all the procedures and the interventions and the injections and the treatments for people, but you're also taking care of their underlying biology with a whole team of providers that is helping to actually accelerate your results. You said the other day that people get better three times faster if they take care of their overall health while they're trying to take care of their mechanical problems.

And, you know, I think this, we were talking about this, this is my personal COVID blessing that I think the kind of from a certain perspective, all the rules changed. And from a certain perspective, I've kind of said to myself, well, I'm out, I'm treating people, I'm getting exposed. And so I just completely took, like, I'm doing everything that you say to do now. Right. You know, and I feel better than I've honestly ever felt in my life. And I noticed I'm talking to people, like I was talking to this friend of mine, the new patient who I really love. And he was like, well, I stopped it in and I burger on the way in. And so then I said, guess what? You're never eating an In-N-Out burger the rest of your life. Exactly. And you know what? It went, and it was like, I go, this is COVID, this is a new game. And he goes, okay, that's awesome. He goes, I like that, I'll do it. And then he did, and then he lost like 20 pounds, and he looks totally fantastic.

Amazing.

And then all of these things went away. And so then I've actually been like leaning into this because I feel like now I have a little moment to say, do what Mark says.

Yeah.

You know, fall of this thing and I feel like it's totally working.

Hi everyone. Hope you're enjoying the episode. Before we continue, we have a quick message from Dr. Mark Hyman about his new company, Farmacy, and their first product, the 10-day reset. Hey, it's Dr. Hyman. Do you have FLC- What's FLC? It's when you feel like crap. It's a problem that so many people suffer from and often have no idea that it's not normal or that you can fix it. I mean, you know the feeling. It's when you're super sluggish, your digestion's off, you can't think clearly, or you have brain fog, or you just feel run down. Can you relate? I know most people can. But the real question is, what the heck do we do about it? Well, I hate to break the news, but there's no magic bullet. FLC isn't caused by one single thing, so there's not one single solution. However, there is a systems-based approach, a way to tackle the multiple root factors that contribute to FLC. And I call that system the 10-day reset. The 10-day reset combines food, key lifestyle habits, and targeted supplements to address FLC straight on. It's a protocol that I've used with thousands of my community members to help them get their health back on track. It's not a magic bullet. It's not a quick fix. It's a system that works. If you want to learn more and get your health back on track, click on the button below or visit getpharmacy.com that's getpharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y.com Now back to this week's episode. Let's talk about COVID because not only are you treating all these biomechanical issues and other people's chronic problems like Lyme and mold and so forth, but you're also really working very much in the trenches with patients with COVID and you're treating them when they have COVID, you're treating them afterwards and you're seeing pretty extraordinary results. And I remember very early on we talked and you spent a lot of time looking at the science and the research of what could potentially help. Now, there's obviously no trials on anything for COVID, right? So we've to sort of go on what works for viruses, what works for the immune function, what works to help optimize people's health, what likely would work. And you came up with a whole approach which was really robust, which is actually very similar to what I came to independent of you about what to do to these people. and you've been doing it. So first, let's talk about why it's more important than ever to be healthy and focus on your health rather than just eating Doritos and having Dunkin' Donuts every day because you're depressed and you want to binge eat and why that's so bad in COVID. And two, why it was more important than ever to actually focus on optimizing your health in the face of COVID and not just sort of going to all that. And then we'll get into some of the details of what you're doing.

So that's a totally fantastic question. It's the question of our lives. And what functional medicine is, is a systems approach to approaching inflammation and lowering it, which is why in a way we were designed for being ready to help people, not just with the initial segment of COVID but with the long-term aspect of it. and what happens is that COVID can come into the body and bind onto cells and when it does that, it creates inflammation and potentiates inflammation that may or may not already be there. And it can do that in your airway, it can do it in your brain, it can do it in your lungs, it can do it in your heart, it can do it in your kidneys, and it can do it in your gut. And from a systems perspective, everywhere in the body we're trying to do things to address all of those areas and optimize them. And COVID can lead to inflammation and sometimes it can lead to runaway inflammation. And my experience taking care of people is when the runaway inflammation happens, I think it's kind of like what you say. Their system was already pre-wired to just go into inflammation. So they're at higher risk for it.

Yeah.

But People who have systems problems, people that have sleep apnea, people that have obesity, people that have heart and lung problems, they just don't have that much capacity to accept that much stress on their body. And so then they just go down way quicker.

They're just sitting duck, right? And I think we see in this country that the people who are dying are the people who are overweight, not even obese, two and a half times more. likely to get sick or die. If you're obese, you're 12 times more likely to get sick or die. I know. If you have heart disease or diabetes or you're older or have high blood pressure, again, you're more likely to get hospitalized and die. And all these conditions are disease of inflammation that are driven by our lifestyle, that are driven by diet, that are driven by chronic stress and nutritional factors and toxins and all these things that we deal with. So when you've been approaching these COVID patients, both and prevention as well as treating them. And you're one of the very few doctors who's using these approaches to treat COVID patients and you're seeing pretty remarkable results. Can you share a little bit about what that is that you do and how you think about approaching these patients and what you're seeing in these patients results?

Yeah, so the first thing that I'm doing is taking that systems approach and trying to understand everything, understand all the rules of the game and what's happening. kind of use that as the framework for my strategy. Then the second thing is, is I either have people who are remote and not around here or people who are here. For the remote people, then what I'm doing is I'm coaching them about things that they can take from a supplement perspective. And I think there's a lot that you can do from a supplement perspective that almost everybody at this point knows about. So there's things like vitamin C, glutathione, quercetin. and there's all of these- Vitamin D.

I mean- Vitamin D. There's a study that reduced ICU admissions by 95% if your vitamin D levels were adequate. Yes. And 80% of Americans don't have adequate vitamin D levels.

Exactly.

That's pennies a day and easy to do and there's no side effects.

And vitamin D, you got to give them a pretty high dose. What dose are you giving people?

Really, I focus on the lab value, right? So it should be between 45 to 65 or 70, ideally. And to get that, you usually need about three to five thousand units a day per person. But if they're very sick, they're we're giving them 30,000 units a day.

Exactly. And so then you can give somebody 30 to 50,000 units a day if they're real sick while they just got it while you're trying to support them. And then relatively quickly after three or four days, I'm going to come down to five or ten thousand units a day. And I think vitamin D is super important. And then, so we're giving people supplements that they can take. in by mouth so that you can swallow. The other thing that I'm doing that's real important and I'm convinced that this is at least somewhat helpful is that we're doing a lot of nebulizing protocols with people.

Yeah, talk about what is nebulizing.

So, people have probably heard of asthma and a lot of patients that have asthma have a little machine that's a little box and it blows air through some plastic disposable tubing, and you can put a medication in there and it blows air so fast that it atomizes it and turns it into a mist. So for people that have asthma, then if you put albuterol or other medications in there, it mists it, and by turning that thing into a mist, you can breathe it all the way in and it spreads everywhere in the lungs.

That's a good thing.

That's a very good thing.

What are you using to help people breathe?

So what I've been using is I've been using a lot of glutathione. And glutathione is one of the best antioxidants in the body and it helps at lowering that inflammation all over in the lungs. And so I've had a lot of people tell me I was going to go to the hospital, but then I did the nebulizing treatment that you gave me and I got through that night. And I had to do that two nights and I nebulized two or three times over the night, but then I didn't have to go to the hospital and then I was fine.

Yeah, amazing. Yeah, there have been studies where they've actually done even injecting glutathione and seeing very impressive results. So, there's a lot of treatments that are not getting airplay. You're hearing about hydroxychloroquine and remdesivir and dexamethasone and all these new drugs. Those are marginally effective and they have significant side effects and they often cost a ton where the things we're talking about are relatively inexpensive and very effective and have no side effects.

Right, right. And so then also colloidal silver is a great thing to nebulize. And then we also have a protocol where I'll use hypertonic C minerals and that will increase the pH of the mucosa and seems to be helpful both for a lot of the upper respiratory symptoms, but also the pulmonary symptoms. And so then if we go back to kind of the theme of our conversation of the systems approach, then I'm actually pro, like I have a patient in the hospital and so they're giving him Remdesivir. But then, I'd really like to be in a situation because this person was really benefiting from the nebulizing. And so, we'd like to really have them nebulize. All of these particles are spreading around and so we try not to have people do that when they're exposed to anyone else. We do our nebulizing strategies, but we have people do it in their home, in a room that nobody else is going in or outside.

Right, yeah, powerful. You're also using other treatments when people come in who are sick, you're using intravenous treatments.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're using ozone or other kinds of things like that.

Yeah, so I'm using ozone and we're putting that together as part of a clinical trial similar to what you're doing so that we can gather results.

Yeah, we have now a group of us have put it forth an investigational new drug application, we call it IND to the FDA Food and Drug Administration to get approval for doing a study. They're doing a lot of this in Europe and they're seeing incredible results in Europe. And I encourage people to look online and actually find some of the data we'll put in the show notes. But there's a lot of published case series, there's a number of randomized trials going on in Europe. And then there's a lot of potential for how this can work to help to address the immune system, address inflammation, address some of the coagulation issues, the clotting issues that people have. So, there's a lot of benefits and I'm sort of really curious to hear about your experiences with this. I mean, this isn't proven yet. It needs to be proven.

But, yeah, it needs to be proven.

People are trying different things and you're seeing things happen.

If someone that I care about had COVID, that would be the, I think, the most important thing to do. But, I treated one kid, a friend of mine's kid, who came in, couldn't smell, couldn't walk up the stairs to my office. At the end of the treatment, he could smell totally fine. I asked him, he said, can you smell? He goes, do you have a lemon in your office? And I go, probably, and I did, and he was like, I smell perfect. And then he basically was fine ever since then. And so that goes to show you, you have a young, healthy kid that's really bad, and they get better pretty quickly, whereas these complex things, They're already.

Pre-Inflamed and older and it struggles.

On the ozone front, high-dose ozone therapy, I think, is the greatest thing. Ozone dialysis is even better and I think definitely works better. But, there are a lot of techniques like major autologous hemotherapy where you can-.

There are simpler techniques. And those are the ones they're using in Europe with incredible effect.

Yeah, and I teach that. And if people want to come to my office, I have doctors almost every day in the office. office and I teach that technique. And I think that that is a game changing technique. On the ozone front, you can do ozone water, which I think you can drink ozone water.

Does that ruin your microbiome?

I don't think ozone water really affects the microbiome too much because it's all getting absorbed in your small intestine where you're not supposed to have any bacteria anyways. But the rectal ozone, I think, can affect it. If I had COVID, I would do rectal ozone just because I would be.

And that's something anybody can do at home.

That's something if they have an ozone generator. But then the other thing that I think is if ozone was number one, the problem with ozone is you got to have a doctor that knows how to do it and they need to be taught and we just haven't been able to scale that. But there's another field of medicine that is probably near and dear to my heart for about a hundred different reasons. because it's amazing for pain management. And I use that a lot with injections as peptide therapy. And we have little tiny peptides that are floating around in our bodies. Our body makes proteins that do stuff. And if a protein is a big protein, it's called a protein. If a protein is a little baby protein, it's called a peptide.

It's amino acids strung together, but there's not many of them.

Not too many of them. So then the most famous peptide is insulin. Insulin is a peptide. So 30 million people inject themselves with peptides every day in North America. But it turns out that there's a couple of peptides that come from your thymus gland and they help your white blood cells kill bacteria.

And your thymus gland is basically the gland that is your immune organ in your body.

And so then these peptides, and I'm working with a whole bunch of different ones, but they help your white blood cells fight bacteria. They help your white blood cells fight viruses, make antibodies. They help your gamma delta T cells kill viruses.

Those are your white blood cells.

These are white blood cells. So there's a host of things that the peptides do to regulate and kind of harmonize how your immune system works. and what I've seen is- these aren't.

Drugs that just have one function. They're multifunctional substances that help to regulate the body's own healing systems. This is a really central point I want to make because this is how functional medicine works. It's what regenerative medicine is. It's what you're talking about. It's not this single drug with a single action, a single outcome for a single disease. It's understanding the body is this complex, dynamic, adaptive system, and in order to actually optimize our health, we need to provide these compounds whether it's a nutrient like vitamin D that has hundreds and hundreds of different actions, or whether it's peptides or exosomes or whether it's placental matrix that are these kind of intelligent substances that know what to do in the body that the body already is familiar with, that it can use to actually repair and heal in ways that traditional medicine can't. And it's just, it's such a brilliant approach, Matt, that you've created.

So, keep going about the peptides. I just wanted to sort of frame it a little bit. Yeah. So, that's super more important. Regulation is everything. Regulation is everything. So, what we're doing with the peptides, stem cells do the same thing. They regulate your immune system. And we have stem cells in our body that are regulating the immune system. So, if we put peptides in, it'll help our stem cells regulate. If we put stem cells in, it'll help the peptides that are in our body regulate. So, then we're creating kind of a harmonious symphony of our biology and trying to hack and kind of tweak that. And so I always tell people, I'm kind of, I think of myself, if I was going to give myself a compliment, I would say that I'm a McKinsey consultant of the human body.

I love that, a systems analyst.

Yeah, trying to think is... For those.

Who don't know what McKinsey is, it's probably one of the top consulting firms and business analytic firms and looks at systems and governments and businesses. It's a very impressive way that they put together a story of what's actually happening for any group organization or government or business.

I went through their application process to work for them.

Oh, you did?

And then, but then I, and I was like, when, and I, and then, but I had to make a decision because they said, you're going to lose your clinical skills if you do this. And I couldn't walk away from medicine because I loved it so much. Yeah. But maybe that might have been one of the most important things that I ever did. because it opened my eyes to, you know, I was talking to these guys, these senior level guys, and they were super wise and thoughtful, kind of like a lot of the people that we know who can think, like you think. Like you just sit down and like you walk around in the clinic and like immediately see what's wrong and how to fix it. You know, super, I was like, oh my God, I would actually hire you to be my consultant.

I was pretty impressed. So one of the things I want to talk about in addition to the things you're treating COVID with is this phenomena that we're seeing which is increasingly disturbing to me as a physician is this post-COVID syndrome. So when you look now, we've got 6 million Americans, 7 million Americans, how many we're gonna have, how many actually Americans have had COVID? Probably 2, 3, 4, 5, maybe 10 times that. So maybe it's 50 million, 30 million. And this phenomena of people getting COVID and then not fully recovering. It's not like you get the flu, you're sick for two weeks and you're bounced back and you're fine. This is a long-term thing. And today I just read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that terrified me, which was of elite athletes who got COVID who have persistent inflammation in their heart muscle afterwards that reduces their longevity and increases the risk of all sorts of problems, decreases their performance. I mean, you're talking not some old person with diabetes, you're talking about an elite professional athlete. So this post-COVID thing is a real problem and there is currently really not that much science being done on it. There's some descriptive stuff being done. There's not much thinking as I can tell except for people like you and I about actually how do we approach this? How do we start to think about helping these patients? If you have COVID, should be on a protocol afterwards so that you don't get the post-COVID syndrome. If you do have post-COVID and you don't get better and you're sick for months and months, even after you're quote not infectious, what's that about? So what is this post-COVID syndrome?

What are the symptoms and what can we do about it? This is The defining question of our lives that we're going to face. This is the defining thing that I think we will be facing for the next 10, 15, 20 years, which is going to be the bulk of our clinical experience.

I mean, just before you go in, I just want to give you a quick statistics. SARS, which was the other virus that was a coronavirus that killed people very quickly, the people who survived 40% of them had chronic fatigue at three years.

Right, and a lot of them have PTSD also.

87% of people who were admitted to the hospital with COVID are sick at two months. Now, that's kind of scary.

Right, yeah, so super scary. A friend of mine had a patient present to him who was like a super elite famous VIP athlete and presented with amenorrhea, lost their period.

Yeah.

And so it goes from there to catastrophic overwhelm with people with constant chest pain and constant neurological symptoms. People will have nerve pain. People will have all kinds of neurological.

Symptoms in their head.

And fundamentally, it is going to turn from being the super aggressive viral storm picture into a picture that mirrors very similar what Lyme disease is like. And so, what's going to happen through the arc of as we watch this, it's going to behave like a lot of these things. It hides out. And by the way, you're talking about Lyme. You're talking about people who not just.

Get Lyme and get treated for three weeks, but Lyme persists. And there are a lot of people who suffer from chronic Lyme, which isn't even well recognized in traditional medicine, but it's a real thing. And you and I have taken take care of these patients. We've seen their lab tests. We've seen them get better when we treat it. And it's very difficult to treat. It gets inside the cells. It's persistent.

And you're saying COVID is similar. It gets inside cells. It's persistent. It hangs around. Now, there's a question, and I'm not sure that I know the answer to this. I think that the virus persists in the body and that it's going to persist and wax and wane and come in and out. It may not because there are some people who are continuing to test positive as long haulers. There are other people who are not testing positive. It may be the test is negative, but it's still in their brain. But what happens is they have pervasive systems dysfunction, particularly immune and neurologic and vascular. Those are the three places that it goes. And so then what we have to do is basically do functional medicine, do an amazing job of supporting them and getting them healthy, detoxing them. But then there's some simple things that I think are going to be home runs over the long term. And I think the data will eventually bear this out. And one is peptide therapy for post COVID. I think I break it down into two categories, whether people are remote or whether they're in person. If they're remote, I have everybody taking this peptide thymosin alpha one. and I'm having people, if they've had COVID, take this peptide for three to six months. And I'm noticing people- Every day. Every day. And so when they do that, people tell me, God, I feel a lot better. And I've had a lot of people remote that had a lot of symptoms, and then they start taking, it's just a little insulin syringe, and they just inject like a 10th of a CC every day. And when they inject this tiny amount of fluid, it starts to regulate their immune system. And I'm seeing it help basically almost all post-COVID.

Is this kind of thing good for.

You go with lime or this also it turns out it's also really good for lime. It's also I put everybody that has SIBO and leaky gut and GI inflammation on it. And so it's a, it's kind of an all-purpose worker horse peptide that turns out to be great for either it, I think for prophylactic prophylaxis to prevent from getting COVID. And, and so anybody that if, if, if one person in the house gets COVID, I put everybody else in house on this peptide. If you have it acutely, it helps and there's different dosing that we do depending on whether you have an acute or you don't. And then finally for these long haulers, these people that have this COVID for a long time, we're doing that and it's been really, really helpful. I like other peptides also. I like thymosin beta-4, which is also really good for regulating the immune system. And I like BPC-157, but not for everybody and there's some issues with that.

There's a whole list of peptides that are used for all kinds of different things. And I think that, you know, that's really an interesting emerging field of medical therapy that's still sort of on the fringe. And I think where can people sort of learn more about peptides and how to use them?

So we're doing some courses where I'm doing an online course where I'm teaching starting in a couple of weeks, a weekly class where we talk about peptides every day. Peptides are great for the immune stuff, but they're amazing for pain. And so the other thing we're starting in a couple of weeks is I do these videos where I do yoga and stretching, and then I literally teach people where to inject peptides, for example, around their knee or their ankle or their hip. It is super helpful. So, that's great. But then the amazing thing is that a doctor can write a prescription to a compounding pharmacy, and then they will take this peptide and put it sterile in a vial and mail it to you, and then you can take it.

Do it yourself.

And then you can do it yourself.

So what do you do for people who are here in the office that you see have post-COVID and how are they doing with the treatments?

So my feeling on this is interesting is that everything that works for pre-COVID and everything that works for treating acute COVID works for the long haulers.

Exactly, right.

Yeah, so ozone, probably number one, vitamin C, Glutathione.

Intravenous vitamin C. Intravenous.

Yeah, intravenous ozone. There's a vitamin called NAD, which seems to stimulate your mitochondria and it's a ubiquitous molecule in the body that has all, it's basically a signal of your energy stores. Yeah. And so we use that and interestingly, one of the first things that happens when you start treating people with NAD is their vascular health starts to improve. And the reason is, is that cells love NAD because it's like money to a cell. And so it represents potential energy. And so then if you put a molecule in a vein, the first thing that's going to happen is it's going to try to diffuse out of that vein. And then when it tries to diffuse out of the vein, it's going to get absorbed by the cells that line your vein and artery. And so then what happens is you improve the health of those cells. So I have a lot of people that come with vascular problems and I start doing NAD and they get better. Well, guess where COVID goes to your blood vessels. And that's why people have so many problems with their heart or their kidney or their brain because it's inflammation in the blood vessels. and then it can leak out and then get into the nerves, which is why we're trying to put something in the blood vessel, whether that be ozone, whether that be vitamin C, whether that be glutathione, whether it be NAD. I've submitted IND for exosomes to the FDA. Yeah, research proposal. And so we're going back. We're on our exosome. Exosomes are helpful.

For.

Yeah, we're going to do a randomized clinical trial with exosomes for COVID. Amazing. And so we're, I think we're going to get approved in the next day or two. We're like two or three rounds deep with the FDA just going back and.

Forth with the PhDs. So there's a whole realm of medicine out there that is just emerging over the last few decades. It's still on the margins that you and I are in. Places like Cleveland Clinic, they've introduced functional medicine. They're starting to do this more and more in different health care centers and hospitals around the country. But it's unfortunate because people really have trouble accessing this. But I think the work you're doing and stuff we've done at Cleveland Clinic that I've tried to do over the years is really trying to break ground. So this is more accessible for everybody. Because ultimately it has to be covered by insurance. It has to be accessible. It has to, the cost has to come down. And it has to be something that people can get access to. Right now it's hard. But I think people should have hope and there's a lot of stuff that they can do that isn't that expensive. Diet, lifestyle issues, sleep, exercise, the right supplements, and even some IV treatments may not be that expensive. So I think there's ways to get yourself healthy in this time that people really need to focus on. And the challenge for us is that, you know, we just go about our lives, we're busy in this and that, but now more than ever people need to think about their personal health, not just for themselves, but for their family, their communities, for their society. and really the world because we're really facing this pandemic that's not going away and we need to be smart about how do we protect ourselves and make us more resilient in the face of it. Your work is just so fantastic, Matt. I mean, I just, your clinic, Bioreset Medical, which is in Northern California, is really a beacon of hope for so many people. It is for me. I know I'm like, thank God you were born because without you, I would still be in chronic pain all the time. And I never thought I would be out of it. and I'm just so grateful that you were able to help me and help so many people and I've sent so many patients to you who've done so well and continue to do well and it's just such a great pioneering work that you're doing and I'm just so thankful for you and your work, Matt.

It's amazing, you know. I'm so, I like, that's the nicest thing I've ever said. I want to cry. But you know what, it's like, it's interesting, it's like the greatest thing in the world to be a doctor. Just the greatest thing in the world. And it's interesting because people come into the clinic and they talk and sometimes we do a lot of PTSD. And I've got to tell you, there's so many people with COVID and trauma and maybe they had a little bit of trauma and there's so many people that had SARS ended up with PTSD and numbers like in the 20 and 30%. And I think that's going to happen with COVID And so then for me, it's like this amazing journey of going through the day and just trying to get through, but I insanely love it. And I actually have more hope than I ever did because with the way that you describe medicine, I feel like it's a coherent and thoughtful way of taking care of people.

It totally is. And it works. It works. It really works. Thank you for being on the Dr. Charles Pharmacy Podcast, Matt. If you want to learn more about Matt and his work, you can go to bioresetmedical.com if you want to listen to his podcast, go to bioresetpodcast.com He's just a wealth of knowledge and insight. He's my new guru. I've learned so much from Matt and I've been around the block and there are very few people out there doing this pioneering work and I just look up to you so much, Matt. So thank you for doing what you do. Thank you for being on the podcast. If you love this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. Leave a comment, share your experiences about your struggles with COVID or with chronic pain and what you've learned and what you've done and discovered that might help other people. And subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.

Thank you so much.